Cesar Aira - Shantytown

Vanessa, she thought, had obviously wanted to talk to her. She’d been impelled by some mysterious but irresistible desire. Not because she wanted to make peace, or negotiate, or continue the quarrel with fresh accusations, but for some other reason unknown to Jessica (neither of them knew, nor could have known, what it was). When she hadn’t been able to get through, she’d made up any old excuse to justify the call, the first thing that came into her head: asking for the name of the neighbors on the third floor, whose apartment was right in front of her. And when she’d hung up and realized that the call had been a fiasco, she’d broken down crying. Jessica could understand that too, especially since she felt that she was about to burst into tears herself. None of it made any sense, even if she could make sense of it.

She was standing there looking at the façade of the building opposite. The two buildings were mirror images of each other. They had been built by the same construction company and were identical down to the last detail, not just on the outside, but in the internal layout of the apartments too. The balconies were full of plants, with big festoons of foliage spilling down to the balconies below. The windows reflected the building across the street: Vanessa’s building reflected Jessica’s, and vice versa. And an attentive observer with a sharp eye would no doubt have been able to see a reflection within the reflection, and so on ad infinitum, as with mirrors set up face to face.

To think that when Vanessa called, she was coming up in the elevator! It was such a close thing, a matter of seconds! And the way Vanessa had burst into tears, she knew the feeling exactly: an overwhelming surge made up of all the situation’s little details. That’s what life was always like: miniscule, intangible accidents combining to form an immense emotion bigger than life itself. And that was the transcendental justification for the girls’ notorious frivolity; if her mother had been able to understand this, she wouldn’t have had to come up with such far-fetched explanations.

Suddenly, Jessica’s heart stopped. Her breathing too, and her thinking. She froze like a movie still, pressed against the glass, all eyes. Across the street, on the third floor, Vanessa had appeared. When someone you’ve been thinking about intensely appears and is there in front of you, it seems incredible, at least for the first moment, before you begin to communicate, and the mind is otherwise occupied. On this occasion, however, there was no communication because Vanessa didn’t look at Jessica but left her in a state of pure contemplation, trapped, that is, in the initial moment, confined within herself. Nobody likes being left out. An involuntary expression of horror came over Jessica’s face.

Vanessa didn’t look up once. She was staring straight ahead. It was Vanessa all right, but somehow — and this was the scariest thing — it wasn’t. She was very pale, “white as a sheet,” except her nose and around her eyes, where the skin was a bright carmine color. She looked like a clown with her face painted white and red. And the face, although still hers, was not a face: it had no outer surface, it was hollowed or sharpened, almost concave. The eyes were independent of it, staring straight ahead, like those of a robot. Her body seemed to be hanging from her gaze, and its stiffness suggested a superhuman determination, as if thought could no longer act upon it, only gravity. For a moment, Jessica had the horrific impression that she was about to jump. “She’s going to jump!” And there was nothing she could do! That tiny shift in time was going to be what killed her. Jessica looked away in anguish, not to find help but because her eyes were the only part of her body that she could move. And she saw a little black figure in the glass door that opened onto the balcony of the apartment just above Vanessa’s. The size of this figure intrigued her: it was too small. A little human figure making gratuitous circular movements, as if performing a strange dance without music, in a space where it didn’t belong, midway between floor and ceiling. It took Jessica a while to realize that what she was seeing was a reflection of someone in her own building.

She half-closed her eyes, keeping them fixed on the unidentified figure, who must have been below her, on the third floor, and was, she now realized, the object of Vanessa’s spellbound stare. What her mother had said about that mysterious third floor came back to her like a tidal wave and swept all her earlier thoughts away. But what was she doing, that woman in black, moving back and forth within a tiny space, as if she were inside a bubble? Was it Élida, the lady her mother chatted with? No, it was a girl. . and those little steps backward and forward, opening and closing her arms. She looked like a doll in a music box. Finally Jessica worked it out: they were the movements of someone who is cleaning a room: making the bed, tidying up, vacuuming. The room must have been full of light, and she was wearing black; that’s why only her figure was visible. And that explained who she was: the maid. And perhaps it also explained why Vanessa was watching her with such interest. But why would Vanessa care about how that room was being cleaned? What did that have to do with religion? Maybe it was true that she had tried to call that apartment. For some deeply mysterious reason involving religion and housekeeping. And then the crying, the captivated stupor. .

Jessica looked at her friend again. Vanessa was still there, frozen. She lifted her gaze to the reflected figure, then let it drop back to Vanessa. She was beginning to breathe again. The horror was gradually receding, but deepening as well and expanding enormously. Up until now she had been assuming that she was Vanessa’s secret. Her interpretation of this strange scene had been entirely based on that assumption. But nobody owned the secret: it could detach itself from individuals and take over the world, and then there’d be no hope of understanding anything.

She couldn’t make out the face of the girl in the reflection, but she didn’t need to. Her silhouette, her movements and her general aura were as unique as the features of a face. And they reminded Jessica of someone, irresistibly. She knew who it was: Cynthia, the girl who got killed, Cynthia Cabezas. Poor Vanessa! She’d seen Cynthia from her apartment and panicked. But how could a dead girl be there, on the third floor, making the beds? And not just that: the really unbelievable thing was that Cynthia, a student at Misericordia, like them, was working as a maid, even if she was dead. But if the owners of that apartment belonged to an esoteric cult, maybe they were using dead people as slaves. . Vanessa had discovered their secret, and now she didn’t know what to do. Jessica resolved to intervene, though she wasn’t sure how. It had to be something properly planned, she couldn’t simply improvise. In spite of everything, she almost smiled to see how fragile reason was: Vanessa’s crumbled at the first blow, all she’d been able to do was reach for the phone, like a castaway grasping at a plank.

Rapt, in the pink winter dusk, Maxi was contemplating something. . something without a name. Action. Or silence. But no, it really didn’t have a name. And then, in the depths of the inexpressible, the work that he had invented began like a melody. Was it work? A service? A way to give meaning to his strength and free time? Or was it nothing at all? It was as if someone had made it his job to give up his seat on the bus. Doing a favor for a stranger in the street is, essentially, a spontaneous, unpremeditated act, almost an improvisation; in any case, not planned ahead, and impossible to integrate into a program. And yet that was what Maxi seemed to have done. But not exactly or entirely. His action hovered in a kind of ambiguity. For a start, it didn’t have a clear purpose. And any purpose it might have had was determined not by him but by the nature of the scavengers’ work. The scavengers themselves were not an eternal given; their very existence was contingent and depended on historical circumstances. Rummaging through garbage is not something that people do out of a sense of vocation: a little socio-economic shift would have been enough to provide them all with alternative occupations. But there they were: rummaging through garbage! It was as if they had adapted instantaneously, from one day to the next. Perhaps sudden adaptations like that were more frequent than they seemed; perhaps they were the norm. And they must have been occurring at many levels, on one of which a niche had opened up for Maxi, who, in his way, had also effected an adaptation, or something similar: he had transfigured an impulsive, spontaneous gesture into a way of occupying time.